Glossary

A Native American group of Northern Paiute speakers who lived in the Snake River plain of the Great Basin. They were buffalo hunters who lived with the Shoshone speakers in peaceful cooperation. During 1867-1868, both groups were moved to the Fort Hall Reservation in Idaho where they live today.

A complex of ideas used to stereotype the American Indians as a "good, proud, independent" people living in harmony with nature. From the sixteenth century visual representations of the "noble savage" often depicted them in classical poses with "exotic" garb of buckskin, furs and feathers.

(sha-sho'-ne) Great Basin Indians who share the Uto-Aztecan language group. There were three distinct groups of Shoshones: (1) Western Shoshones, in central and northeastern Nevada, southeastern California, and northwestern Utah; (2) Northern Shoshones, in southern Idaho; and (3) Eastern Shoshones, in western Wyoming.

A political unit of Native Americans. Each tribe is united by common history, territory, culture and language. This term has been widely used in anthropology, but there is no general consensus as to its precise definition or appropriate application. Anthropological study shows that the colonial concept of the tribe as an ethnically, linguistically, culturally, and politically autonomous and self-conscious unit was a gross oversimplification of the complex panorama of inter-ethnic and regional social relations